In the Shape of a Boar
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| Author(s) | Lawrence Norfolk |
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| Publisher | Grove Press |
| Honors | |
| The story begins in the ancient Greece of myth, where King Meleager of Kalydon has assembled the sixty greatest hunters—and one huntress, Atalanta—to rid his realm of the supernatural boar sent by the vengeful goddess Artemis to lay waste to his lands. But as the hunters bear down upon their prey a darker tale unfolds, of treachery and destructive love. It is a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of the Second World War, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer. Solomon Memel, a young… | |
The story begins in the ancient Greece of myth, where King Meleager of Kalydon has assembled the sixty greatest hunters—and one huntress, Atalanta—to rid his realm of the supernatural boar sent by the vengeful goddess Artemis to lay waste to his lands. But as the hunters bear down upon their prey a darker tale unfolds, of treachery and destructive love. It is a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of the Second World War, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer.
Solomon Memel, a young Jewish Romanian refugee who was rescued by resistance fighters and subsequently joined them in their chase, will be inspired by the experience to write a poem, titled “Die Keilerjagd”, or “The Boar Hunt”, which mixes the elements of the mythical hunt with the historical pursuit of S.S. field commandant Heinrich Eberhardt. The partisans, from the charismatic leader Xanthos to the dangerous beauty Theyella, will themselves become part of modern mythos, as the poem becomes an international sensation. But the truth of what happened in the hills of Kalydon in 1945 is more complicated than it seems, and as the older Sol reunites with his childhood love, Ruth, in 1970s Paris to make a film version of the poem, the dark memories and horrors of those days emerge anew.
Epic in scope and staggering in its mastery of language and character, In the Shape of a Boar is a tour de force.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Lawrence Norfolk’s third novel takes the boar hunt as its central metaphor to discuss love, betrayal, fear and the annihilation of war. The first section begins in Ancient Greece with the hunt for the boar of Kalydon, then moves to Paris in the 1970s, where the poet, Sol Memel’s life echoes the mythological prototypes.
When King Oeneus neglects to sacrifice animals to Artemis at the festival of First Fruits, she sends a boar of gigantic proportions and ferocious strength to destroy the land. The king’s son, Meleager, gathers prize hunters to kill it. They form “a new, earth-bound constellation” as they converge around Mount Aracynthus, already “one another’s quarry in a bloodless preparatory hunt”. Their roll call creates “a palace of sound”.
Norfolk’s beautifully compelling prose establishes a phenomenal pace, mirroring the characters’ charged drive towards their foretold destiny. He creates a dense geography of paths of sumac and oak, wild pear trees, brushwood, sedge, spurge, lentisc, wild olives and myrtle, until Greece itself emerges as a recurrent and potent character. The three strongest hunters, Meleager, Atalanta and her cousin Meilanion form a powerful triangle of desire, for victory and each other. As they move into the terrain of the boar, the narrative is as tense as any urban thriller chase. When victims of the boar are discovered gored by branches of a tree, Norfolk luxuriates in the violence, as though exorcising a part of himself. As Sol Memel suggests about the horrors of the Second World War: “Memories were violent from the inside out. People made them up because they had to.”
In the second section, the three mythic hunters are re-created in Sol and his two best friends, Ruth and Jakob, who’ve each escaped the Jewish ghetto in different ways. Here, the purpose of Norfolk’s excessive classical footnotes becomes clear when Sol’s masterpiece, Die Keilerjagd—The Hunt of the Boar is published with obsessive annotations by his old rival, Jakob, undermining Sol’s integrity. Although the second half of the book is less clotted, the intensity of the hunt is diffused and much less gripping. In the Shape of a Boar is an ambitiously layered novel, in which the reader becomes complicit in the hunt for truth and the creation of evil.—Cherry Smyth
